» Upgrade OpenOffice.org on SUSE Linux

OpenOffice.org upgrades are provided in the projects/OpenOffice.org subdirectory on several mirrors, as RPMs specifically tailored for SUSE Linux. To avoid the tedious procedure of downloading them yourself, one should better use some package manager frontend like YaST2, smart, apt, yum. Unfortunately, that "projects/OpenOffice.org" directory has no repository metadata as of now (hopefully been fixed soon), but Eberhard Moenke of ftp.gwdg.de kindly provides some in his apt-rpm SUSE repositories. Here is how to add that repository as a channel in smart (get my SUSE RPMs of smart here) for easy upgrading.

Prerequisite: have smart installed on your SUSE Linux

If you have my repository in your list of YaST2 installation sources, then it's as easy as running

yast2 --install smart

followed by

smart update

(both as root). The first time you run smart (as above), you will be prompted for a list of channels (= package repositories, in smart-speak) to include (or not) in order to install packages and resolve dependencies. My recommendation is to include all of them (= SUSE Linux repositories for the base system and updates, my repository and Packman). If you don't have my repository in your list of installation sources, add it like this:

installation_sources -a http://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/misc/suser-guru/rpm/10.0

(or 10.1, or 9.3, or 9.2, ...)

Add the OpenOffice.org apt-rpm repository in smart

smart channel --add openoffice type=apt-rpm baseurl=ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE/10.0-i386 components=openoffice

Note: obviously, if you use 9.3, change the baseurl parameter above accordingly ;) Also, you might notice that there are no x86_64 RPMs for OpenOffice_org - that's fine; if you have a 64bit system (AMD64 or EMT64 and a x86_64 kernel), just install the i586 binaries, they will run just fine thanks to the biarch infrastructure and 32bit variants of required libraries. So, regardless of whether you have a 32bit (i586/i686) or 64bit (x86_64) Intel/AMD system, use the URL as above with -i386 (but make sure to use the proper distribution version in the baseurl URL).

Add one or more mirrors for that repository

ftp.gwdg.de is often under very heavy load, as it is the primary mirror for SUSE Linux. Hence, to have better download performance and to avoid putting even more load on ftp.gwdg.de, we're going to add a mirror location for that repository in smart. Here's an example with a fast mirror in Europe (Germany, actually):

smart mirror --add ftp://ftp.gwdg.de/pub/linux/suse/apt/SuSE ftp://ftp.uni-erlangen.de/pub/mirrors/suse/apt/SuSE

Synchronize/download the repository metadata

Now let's tell smart to synchronize the metadata for that channel. In this case, as we've just added the channel, it will download (the metadata, not RPM files):

smart update openoffice

Upgrade the OpenOffice_org packages

And finally, let smart get the real job done:

smart upgrade OpenOffice_org\*

(the \* is just a shell escape, to avoid the shell completing that expression with filenames, in case you'd have files named OpenOffice_org-something in the current working directory)